A woman who says she was sexually assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell alleged that Maxwell threatened her life after the assault.
Maria Farmer was living in New York City when she met Epstein and Maxwell at an art show. Farmer, an artist, sold one of her paintings to Epstein, and the man offered her a job working at the front desk of his New York City townhouse.
She told CBS that she saw “many, many, many, many” young women entering the house, “all day long.”
“I saw Ghislaine going to get the women. She went to places like Central Park. I was with her a couple of times in the car … She would say, ‘Stop the car.’ And she would dash out and get a child,” Farmer said. Maxwell would say she was “getting Victoria’s Secret Models.”
One day, Farmer asked Epstein what was going on in the house and he showed her the floor Maxwell lived on as well as a bathroom that contained an altar where he got his massages. He then took her to a room that showed various monitors from small cameras in bathrooms and bedrooms throughout the mansion.
About a year after meeting Epstein, Farmer was sent to be “an artist in residence” on the estate of Les Wexner, CEO of L Brands, which owns Victoria’s Secret. Epstein was Wexner’s financial advisor for a number of years. Farmer said Epstein bragged that Wexner “would do anything for him.”
Farmer said she was sexually assaulted while staying at Wexner’s estate. When she tried to escape the next day, a member of Wexner’s staff confronted her.
“His exact words were: ‘You’re not going anywhere. You are never leaving. You are never leaving,'” she told CBS.
She called her father and he helped her flee.
The Wexner family said they weren’t aware of the incident.
Maxwell later called Farmer and threatened her.
“She says, ‘You’re going out to jog on the West Side Highway every day, and I know this. You need to be very careful because there’s so many ways to die there. So you have to be really careful. Look over your shoulder,'” Farmer said.
Farmer also said the FBI ignored the assault after she reported it to the bureau, not contacting her until 2006 and never following up again.
Maria and her sister, Annie Farmer, who claims to have been assaulted at Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, also spoke with Vanity Fair in the early 2000s, but their account was scrubbed from the final piece.
Before it was published, Epstein himself had shown up at the Vanity Fair offices and spoke to then-editor-in-chief Graydon Carter.
“He was torturing Graydon,” John Connolly, a Vanity Fair contributing editor at the time, told NPR. Epstein pressed Carter on the story, later repeatedly calling him. Carter later received a severed head of a dead cat and a bullet at his apartment.
Carter said in a statement sent to media outlets that the magazine didn’t have three sources, which it considered necessary, later telling NPR that Vicky Ward, the reporter, didn’t have three sources that met the outlet’s “legal threshold.”
Annie and Maria Farmer, and their mother, Janice Farmer, told NPR that they all agreed to go on the record regarding the accusations.
“We hoped the story would put people on notice and they would be stopped from abusing other young girls and young women. That didn’t happen. In the end, the story that ran erased our voices,” they said in a statement.
